


A Moment Deferred

by mickeylover303



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2020-06-26 08:00:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19763929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickeylover303/pseuds/mickeylover303
Summary: Without Itachi, Sasuke has to redefine his existence.  With Naruto, he only finds reasons that make it harder to forget.





	A Moment Deferred

It’s hard to settle for the idea of imperfection, hard to believe in such an incredibly hapless notion when never before had his reality held any significance beyond the ambit of the name he’s always aspired to achieve, the older brother he’s always tried to exceed, because to strive for anything less than perfection is an inherent desire to be weak.

No longer acknowledged, to become unneeded, unwanted.

Spurned, left alive to survive alone.

The precedent ascribed to everything Sasuke strove not to be.

Yet with Itachi’s death fell an unattainable ideal. With two fingers disappeared the last assurance of a sporadic certainty already heavily swayed, distorted by memories he’d failed to efface he won’t allow himself to admit he’s still afraid to forget.

He’ll convince himself he doesn’t remember any of them, though, behind him leave the family he doesn’t have and the brother who had forsaken him to become the man he never knew, pretend instead there didn’t exist a time once before _here_ , a lack of purpose finally fulfilled, manifesting an unremitting twinge, the abject folly of nights too slow to pass he can’t recall how many spent lying awake in Naruto’s bed.

The quiet that lingers is a deadened silence yet to cease, a stark disconnect the effect of an innumerable stillness despite Naruto sleeping beside him, Naruto unguarded, eyes closed and chest rising slowly, his breathing low, a perpetual lull that yields an open scrutiny to a myriad of scars marring the expanse of otherwise smooth skin.

Dark eyes trace them. Constant reminders that begin to evoke too many flaws inescapable his own, Sasuke allows his fingertips to chase the past, allows himself to catalogue one scar after another with an ensuing familiarity, a morbid near apathy towards the course of years gradually eclipsed by each advent of debility.

Amidst the scars unrecognisable, scars too new and some few far much older more difficult to place, scattered lies a broad network of tapering lines already thin seared white. Odd patches without cause litter the inside of Naruto’s arm, subtle memoirs renounced by a selfish vindication, brocaded skin confined by raw, angry blotches readily dulled despite the recurrence of Sasuke’s scratches scored deep.

It always feels a little colder there. As he follows along the curve of Naruto’s shoulder, colder still a nettling sensation it becomes when his fingers carefully hedge a fallibility too wholly apparent, his gaze strayed from the scar plain across Naruto’s chest, the vestiges of another memory yet yawed, but beneath his touch Naruto’s skin begins to grow warm.

Against the soft echoes of Naruto’s breathing grows louder a slight dissonance, the low rumble of erratic pulsations that feels more akin to the vibrations of a muted hum, growing less faint rather than steady the closer his fingers approach Naruto’s stomach, where Naruto’s skin always tends to burn a little hotter, always seems to appear a little more unblemished the farther away he allows his hand to trail from Naruto’s chest.

“...Sasuke.”

One more to string along the next, fleeting is a gentle touch, and his name ambles into another silence, suspended in the near dark the most diminutive of sounds. Like the quiet shuffle of hands, bruised knuckles covered by a calloused palm, Naruto’s fingers entwined with his own, it’s such a meandering thing, nearly lost to a hushed breath, slow spun from sleep, the tiniest discerning fissure that slips away.

Yet between them remains so tenuous a thought. Inconceivable beneath the guise of a careless murmur returns that one hapless notion. _Sasuke_ , he hears. _Sasuke_ , Naruto always says, will sometimes only say, but erred by petty intentions so frail becomes a name, remnants of a word defaced too thin, mere sound, strewn across the onset of a whispered acquiescence no other than his own, because again he hears the careless murmur of his name, again reminds himself his name is what Naruto will always say, and as he turns away from Naruto asleep beside him, Sasuke can only remember he doesn’t know how to forget.


End file.
